Ep. 1380 Kimberly Betts | Voices With Cynthia Chaplin

Hey, guys. Check out Italian wine unplugged two point o brought to you by Mama jumbo shrimp, a fully updated second edition, reviewed and revised by an expert panel of certified Italian wine ambassadors from across the globe. The book also includes an edition by professora Atilushienza. Italy's leading vine geneticist. To pick up a copy today, just head to Amazon dot com or visit us at mama jumbo shrimp dot com. Welcome to the Italian wine podcast. I'm Cynthia Chaaplin, and this is voices. Every Wednesday, I will be sharing conversations with international wine industry professionals discussing issues in diversity, equity, and inclusion through their personal experiences, working in the field of wine. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and rate our show wherever you get your pods. Hello, and welcome to voices. This is we Cynthia Chaplin, and today I am absolutely delighted to have Kimberly Best with me. Kimberly is a managing director and global diversity, equity, and inclusion leader at Deloitte Consulting. She has over twenty five years of experience driving deI, organizational transformation, and change management. Her personal and professional mission is to create more equitable opportunities and outcomes for people who are historically marginalized everywhere in the world. From the workforce, the marketplace, and society perspectives. So Kimberly is basically my ideal guest. Anybody who's listened to voices before knows how passionate I am about these topics. So thank you so much for coming on today. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Oh, great to have you here. I'm so fascinated because you were working on these ideas, you know, deI and all of the the challenges that that that causes way before deI ever became a thing long before it was a term in the sort of local language and and in our consciousness as word people. So I'm just wondering how did you get involved in diversity, equity, and inclusion originally, you know, over twenty five years ago. What what brought you to that? Interestingly, at that time, about thirty eight years ago, I'm dating myself. I started my career in consumer. So I'm in the consumer industry at Deloitte, and I've always been in the consumer industry. And I started my career at a grocery retail company. And one of the things that was really clear, overly clear was how homogeneous the leadership team was at the time, and how When you look at who are the consumers making decisions, particularly in grocery retail, particularly, particularly around food purchases. At that time, it was about eighty five or more percent women, but women were not running any of the companies that were selling. Or or creating making or selling any of the grocery retail products. So I noticed that and ended up getting connected with some women in the industry, actually through my CEO at the time. His name Bill Grides. And he was a huge ally and and supporter. He's no longer with us. I'm sad to say. But one of the things that Bill did as he he was a mentor of mine and certainly a sponsor of mine, And he came back to the office one day, and he said there, you know, there's this there's this woman that I talked to at I think it was a lunch or a conference or something who's looking to try to do some things to try to help support women in the industry. Would you be interested in doing that? And I said, absolutely. So I got connected with those women. I showed up. I showed up at this meeting in New York with this room full of energetic, amazing women. I was probably quite a bit younger than than a lot of these women, all of these, all these women had spent quite a bit of time in the industry with the sole purpose of figuring out how do we support each other? How do we do we bring women into the industry and help them help make them successful? And so what was born out of that connection was, a non profit organization that we created called network and executive women. It's now called next up. So it's been alive and thriving for we incorporated that probably twenty, I guess, maybe about twenty five years ago. So it's still it's still working, which is amazing, the fact that it's still, thriving in the industry. And so it was really back then that I started, really being interested in. I think this could be something I could do. And so I continued in my career, it at the grocery retail company, on my way to Deloitte, because I worked with Deloitte actually as a client. And I thought, oh, these people are really smart. I really like them, and they're fun. That was really important to me. And that's how I ended up at Deloitte. And at the beginning of my career, did a lot of things certainly in the transformation area, but have never thought I had never gotten very far away from this purpose around how to how do we help women which sort of evolved for me into how do we help people who have marginalized? And getting opportunities. And now that's a lot of what I do at Deloitte is working the equity space, helping clients figure out who's getting marginalized and what is happening in the organization. What's happening in the marketplace to perpetuate that and how do we interrupt it? Very exciting. Yeah. That is exciting. It is so interesting. Such an interesting story, you know, as you said, going back twenty five years and noticing that, you know, it's a little depressing that that it's still, something that has to be really brought up and and dragged to the forefront and and looked at more and more But I'm interested how it spun off from being a desire to support women and and moved into an outreach towards other marginalized people, people of color, you know, all kinds of LGBTQ people in our communities, our work communities. And I love what you said about finding fun people to work with. I think it's not enough to have people who look at these challenges often, with a certain degree of anger and we're feeling, you know, a bit of a chip on the shoulder. I think we've all been through it. We you and I are of a certain age and coming up in industries that were predominantly run by men, wine for sure. And as you said, retail in general run by men, especially when we started, we will talk about when that was. It's, it's interesting how fun people do tend to form a more supportive and proactive and successful group than angry people. So I love that you pointed that out. That's something that we don't touch on enough. And and I think being positive about affecting changes is something that's pretty important, but it's it's pretty clear that, you know, the challenges faced by marginalized people in the workforce are still there. You know, we we talk about it, not just women, but but other other groups of people as well. But it's a little bit less clear even after twenty five years that businesses recognize these challenges and what it means to a company's bottom line. I'm wondering how you start that kind of a conversation with a company's leaders, especially if they're men, and how do you convince them to invest in DEAI? Certainly has been a journey. So my own journey around this whole topic of marginalization has been a journey. As someone who grew up, I grew up as a white woman in the US. And there's a a a certain The US has very we have a very specific history with oppression. And as but as someone growing up white, there's a, you know, there's there's certain there's certain kinds of oppression I didn't experience. And so the only way to understand that is to actually focus on it and be very deliberate about experiencing it. And so the approach I try to take to people who have never experienced marginalization is I call it space and grace. So assuming positive intent, assuming, you know, maybe someone has not experienced that before, particularly for white men, I think it's really it can be really difficult. And so I spent a lot of my time. I have to say, I usually try to preface it in appropriate situations in the spirit of love. You need to understand that this happened or you you did this, which created this kind of feeling. And so what when I'm talking with CEOs in particular and leadership teams and trying to understand the history of our marginalization, we don't I mean, it's four hundred and twenty year old issue that we have. At least probably longer. Right. We didn't it didn't happen overnight. And so it's not gonna get remedied overnight. And so in talking with with leadership teams and consumer, in particular, One of the things that can be really powerful is talking about what's happening with the consumer. Because consumers, especially, younger consumers as they're coming into sort of the economic the economic scene amassing wealth to be able to spend discretionary, they have discretionary spending capabilities. That population is getting browner and more diverse. Right? It's it's much more diverse than my generation. I'm an xer. I'm a senior xer, as I like to go myself. And so as you think about the backgrounds of this generation of consumers, and their experience with the world and the way that they the lens through which they see the world, they are making very deliberate choices about where they're spending their money, and they're making very deliberate choices about whom they're spending some of their career time with. When you look at sort of the age that the lifespan of someone coming into the workforce now is much longer than mine, will will be. And so their careers are gonna be much longer, and which means that organizations, they have a huge opportunity to tap into that longevity of a career. If I would say, having said that, if they do not, you know, really internalize how consumers are starting to pay attention to these topics of oppression, and what are you doing as an organization to interrupt oppression? You know, interrupt oppression across all identities, not, you know, a single identity, If you're not paying attention to that, even if you're not creating products that feel inclusive and, you know, someone with a much more diverse background can relate to and resonate with. And if you're not supporting the communities in which you serve and operate, then people are people will continue, especially gen z, gen alpha. I don't whatever. I I don't think we've named the next generation, millennials, of course, to a certain extent. They're gonna make decisions with their dollars, and so they're gonna spend them in different places. So don't be short sighted about don't get to a point where, oh, wow. We've completely ignored this, and now we're, we're at a crisis point. That's really the the conversation I try to have with CEOs and leadership teams. That is such a good point. And I think being able to point to to the bottom line with CEOs is gonna grab their attention. I know I have six children. They range in age from early twenties to early thirties, and they are my consumer focus group as are my young university students that I teach. And it is very interesting what they will pick up on and and what they're looking for in terms of where they spend their money compared to, you know, what I was doing at at that age and stage, you know, back in my day and I'll now date myself. It was apartheid and not, not engaging with companies or universities as was the case with me. That were invested in apartheid. So I watch my young students and and my own family making some really interesting decisions, having interesting conversations about companies that they won't support because of of these practices. So pointing out a bottom line to a CEO, I think is probably the most powerful it shouldn't be, but it's probably the most powerful tool that that we have. So you've spoken a lot. I know in interviews that I've read that you've done about the future of work. And I'm I'm really fascinated by that term and how DEAI is becoming part of that conversation. What do you mean by the future of work and how do you see diversity and equity and inclusion becoming part of that? Future of work is is is a term we started talking about actually pre COVID. So before the pandemic, as a as a firm, we started talking about this topic. And some of the trends that we started seeing before COVID were around the desire for greater flexibility. When you look at the the career span, like I said, of someone, your children's age coming into the workforce, the thought of spending a career at a single organization or two is just not something. It's not a frame. It's not a frame of mind. Nobody stays long enough to get a gold watch anymore. I don't think, you know, even my colleagues, myself, you, you know, we don't intend to have our career in in one place and certainly not my children for, you know, a forty years and and a gold watch. Right. Right. So understanding that that is the trend and how you think about attracting people and how you think about retaining people or following someone through their career span, which may have times inside your organization and times outside of your your organization. So that's sort of a trend that we see in the future of work. Another trend that we see and it will be really interesting to watch what companies do, particularly in this this economic I don't know what to call it, this economic thing that we're in now. Jan Yas, volatility. Volatility. Exactly. Where are the jobs it's interesting because our chief economist points to some of the strengths in the economy when you when you consume some of the sort of public information, it seems more dire, and then some days it doesn't, and then some days it does. So it'll be interesting to see what organizations do as we move through this related to sort of the the network of who can do things to help you achieve your business objectives. Which are not necessarily people on on your balance sheet. It could be people off of your balance sheet, skills and capabilities that you can crowdsource, different bodies of work that don't necessarily have to be held inside your organization as you think about what are some of the core things that you want to be able to be an expert in, or your organization wants to keep in house because you need to Keep controls have the right word, but you need to be able to monitor and watch that on a daily basis. The notion of sort of the off balance sheet associate or off balance sheet set of skills that you might need that you don't necessarily wanna take a house. You wanna you wanna keep it off balance sheet. And then this trend around output. So, you know, what I think about when I started my career, grocery retail, it was you showed up, you were seen, you interacted with people, and your your being there indicated a certain level of activity, and whether there was actual output or not, was less of a focus where organizations, especially with the onset of technology and AI, and I was reading an article today on LinkedIn about all of the technologies you can use for diff to a complete different things just in your daily life. So in an organization, it becomes that much more exponential. So based on all of that, what do you really need to keep on your balance sheet and what can you keep off of your balance sheet? Now there are all of the issues around, well, okay, how do people deal with health care? You have to, you know, historically, you had to be in a job to be able to get access to reliable health care and things like that. How that changes, and those are policy issues. Business is always always are ahead of public policy. And so that when I think about the future of work, it's all of those things combined playing a role and so from an equity perspective, how do you utilize those opportunities? Because if you think about who's coming into the workforce or even the the, the network of skills that you have, it's getting more diverse. And so your the organization's ability to be able to utilize those technologies and utilize those levers with a lens on equity will help to help people determine, I'm not gonna spend my time there because this is the kind of experience I have, or I'm gonna spend my time here because this is the kind of experience I have. So when you think about that whole spaghetti ball of factors, it's a really interesting set of trends that I I think we're seeing. And I think we're at a it felt like we were at a pivotal point when we were in COVID, we certainly were COVID accelerated a bunch of trends that we all already started seeing. It'll be interesting to see how the current economic environment maybe alters that or changes that or sends those trends in a consistent direction. No. That's a that's a really good point. And, of course, year in the States, and I'm in Europe. And I think a lot of what we're seeing is very parallel economically and and policy wise. I like what you said about the lens of equity. I think training leaders to to look at what they're doing through a lens of equity is something that we need to do more of because as you said, we now have a broader base of of remote talent of, of, you know, skills that potentially would have never made it through the door of your more conservative a traditional style of company. And and now these resources are out there, and we need to find ways to access them and and benefit from them and and also benefit the people providing them. So that lens of equity really resonates with me Now I know that you've been doing some work with women of the vine and spirits working with with wine companies on deI. What do you think are the particular challenges to the wine industry for for deI? We touched briefly on the on the fact that it has been primarily a male dominated industry sector for, well, since time began, you know, you look at paintings, the men are pouring wine. But, you know, biblically, the men were pouring wine. But, In in Italy, I think we're a bit behind or more than a bit, but I I won't touch that too much. But, what do you think the particular challenges are? And I know, as I said, you've been working with, women of the Biden spirits in the US, what's what's happening there? Yeah. And so we just published in in March on International Wednesday. We published our second study research that we did focused on what barriers people who identify as women face in the industry. And when you look at some of the results, they were pretty consistent both years, which, I don't know, it's good news, bad news. The good news, I guess, is that we got a much larger sample size the second year. Are you enjoying this podcast? Don't forget to visit our YouTube channel, mama jumbo shrimp for fascinating videos covering stevie Kim and her travels across Italy and beyond. Meeting winemakers, eating local foods, and taking in the scenery. Now, back to the show. The bad news is the results were pretty consistent. And what the results told us is that, the industry is one only above automotive, I think, in terms of Oh my god. Really? That's terrible. Yeah. Uh-uh, in terms of attractiveness. So when you if you look at the study, there's this chart with, like, twenty five lines, and and the bed elk industry is at the bottom. And the re and the reason close to the bottom, a cup one up from the bottom, and that was consistent with last year. And so there's a purse perception. And this was remember, this research was done by people who identify as women. So there's a perception of women that this is not an attractive industry for me to come into. And that's a problem. And one of the things, the first time I presented last year's research, I was at the vibe conference actually in San Diego, And I was on a panel with amazing people like Andrea McBryde of McBryde sisters wine company, which is the largest black female owned wine company in the US. And they have a really interesting story. Google, you know, you can Google it if you if you care to do that. But It's a beautiful story. I highly recommend anybody should Google that. It's a it's a great story, and I've remained friends with Andreas since then. But anyway, when what I said to the audience was I am a I am a wine lover. I have three hundred bottle pair of twin wine fridges, which I've had for a very long time. Alright. So I'm coming to your house when I come to Atlanta. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. But when you think about the product, the product is around celebration. It's fun. It's, you know, celebrating those wonderful life moments. Someone, you know, hitting a milestone or achieving something, the product itself is I because I find a lot of joy in wine in particular, but wine and spirits, the product is designed to, for life's joyous moments, And then there's this huge disconnect between life's joyous moments and is it a desirable industry to come into, which that's a PR problem, but it's also a reality of the kinds of experiences that people who identify as women are having in in these companies. So there's a lot of opportunity to what I would call interrupting bias where it's happening particularly in in those companies. And the other thing that, we found, especially this this past year where we did more analysis and looking at the different tiers. So, suppliers and distributors, wholesalers. And you what we see, I was at WSWA, wine spirits, and wholesales are host sailors of America, the conference, back a few weeks ago in Orlando, presenting the research again with Deborah, Brennan, who founded women of the Biden spirits, and When I was on the show floor, which was all suppliers for the most part, there's a lot of interesting h things happening in the supplier community. There's actually some interesting things happening in the line community in particular. There's where we see a little bit of a difference in what's happening is between suppliers and distributors. The late the sort of the history of how distribution companies have sort of grown up, family owned. There's a lot of history there that create some barriers for major kinds of changes, I think. So when we look at the data, we see differences in the supplier and, you know, and those two tiers of the of the industry around where people feel like some things are happening from an equity perspective and where there's there's opportune there's opportunity across the board, but you start to see some differences emerge between the supplier and the wholesaler community or the distribute distribution community. That's so interesting. I I think here in Italy, of course, history and and family and tradition creates barriers to change for sure. You know, the majority of the wine industry in Italy is is mail driven. Although know, my focus is a lot on on female led wineries and and female winemakers. But we know there aren't enough. We know that nowadays, there are fifty percent women in all of the analogy schools across Italy but only eight percent of them get a job when they graduate. So, there is there is still this bias. And I agree with you about a need to interrupt bias. What are some of the strategies that you offer companies or or often you know, I'm I'm not sure whether you're working directly with yet, maybe you will, with people who are wanting to enter industries and fighting against this bias. How do you, give people strategies? What strategies? For interrupting this kind of bias and these barriers to change. Most of the time, people aren't even aware that they're there. Absolutely. That's spot on. And so one of the things that we talk with organizations about is, okay, let's level set. There's bias everywhere. If you have a brain, you have bias. That's the way your brain. There are shortcuts in your brain that help your brain make sense of the world, and that's where bias can sort of creep in. And and our our bias is one of the things I always use for this analogy. It's one of the things that helped us not get eaten by larger animals at a different point in our evolution. So it's it's a it's it's just a reality. We shouldn't I I when people talk about, well, that's conscious bias or unconscious bias, it really doesn't matter in in my opinion. It's bias that's having a potential negative impact on someone. And very often, it's people who are have identities that are historically marginalized that tend to get negatively impacted by bias. So one of the things we advise organizations to do at the get go is figure out how it's playing out in your organization. Where is it having the greatest impact as a starting point. Lots of organizations, particularly in the US, after the horrendous murder of George Floyd and Ahmed Arbery and Breonna Taylor, and, you know, the list feels like it's endless. It was a bit of a wake up call. There was a lot of sort of, recognition of this whole concept, upon, you know, when that happens, in the US, and So lots of organizations, they started, think, or not it's not that they started. They were sort of reenergized around this whole concept. We have to take a look at this. And so they started doing a lot of things. Started having bias training or other types of training, which is really important. You need to do those things. What I would contend, and this is the conversation I very often have, is peanut butter spreading activities across the organization is less impactful to an outcome than actually targeting your activities because you're not gonna have endless resources and and, you know, whether it's money or people to focus on everything you could potentially be focusing on. So how do you diagnose where bias is happening and where it's having? Such a good point. I I refer to it as window dressing and lip service. It's, you know, you can't just chuck a big, you know, a big wave of of information at the problem and hope that you solve it somehow, or you have to be specific. Yeah. And because when you peanut butter spread, it your outcomes usually get watered down a bit. And so I always use the analogy of going to a doctor. So if I go to a doctor and my leg is broken, and the doctor there is some pain in my arm, however, and the doctor tries to treat my arm, I still have the bigger problem is my leg. So we need to fix that. It's simplistic, but it sort of outlines how important it is to actually go in, and we've done I've done this many times at this point. Collect some data. Look at okay. We can look at you look at HR data to figure out, well, who do you have? Who is a trading? Who is leaving? Who is staying? How are they experiencing the organization? So you take sort of this quantitative data. You put it together with this qualitative data, which is having conversations with people, particularly people who identify in in some of those historically marginalized categories, and ask them, what is it like for you here? What? You know? You need to correctly diagnose the problem, and you can't do that unless you're getting hard data. Right. So looking at that quantitative qualitative data, pulling it together, it tells a very clear story. In every instance, I've done this, it's told a pretty clear story of what's happening and where the focus needs to be. So that's that's how I would suggest organizations treat this. And then they're, you know, in I would say a lot of bias tends to hang out in the HR processes because that's where people are onboarded, they're recruited, they're promoted, and developed. That's where we tend to find bias. It's in the how are you bringing people in and what kinds of people are you bringing in? How is bias coming into play with how you're recruiting into the organization? What kind of skills you actually what how you're everything right down to how job descriptions are written an inclusive utilizing inclusive language or not? That is so interesting. Language in in this sort of using this lens. Again, going back to language is so important because there is still so much exclusive language. Particularly in in wine and beverage. And and and when you're even if you're as someone who might you you have one of those identities that's historically marginalized, you look at how something is written in terms of what's required for the job. And if you can't see yourself, and if it's, you know, male language can be used very heavily in in job descriptions, and then you go and you interview and you interview with a bunch of people that don't, whether it look like you or don't share any of the identities, same identities as you have. It doesn't that's not a recipe for I wanna go spend my time at this organization. So it's those kinds of things as an organization is able to pinpoint. You know what? We have a real problem in talent acquisition, and we have a real problem in who's on the succession plan because we see bias using, random example. We see bias hanging out in both of these places. So this is where we're gonna spend our time for the next year to whatever it's gonna, you know, it it could require to to remedy that those problems. It's it's just fascinating. I, you know, this is this is a topic that I'm very passionate about. But to hear how you're attacking it in a, you know, sort of laser focused manner, I think it's really important and, I think your message, the hard data. I've seen that report and the numbers coming out of it. It's it's important for people to be exposed to this and to the failures that we continue to perpetuate by not addressing specific problems. It's not enough to send everybody for a four hour bias training course. That's not gonna solve the the actual problem. So, before I let you go, I wanna address something that, our listeners, because we're audio, our gonna see what I can see because you and I are actually on the Zoom call. Behind you on your green screen, it says the year of Ally ship and the power to empower. This is something that I think is really important. What does Ally ship mean to you? And and how would you like to see that play out in in the alcohol and beverage industry. Allenship is incredibly important. It's been incredibly important to me personally. And so I have I have a bias around this particular topic, but given who still a lot of the who still makes the rules? A lot of the organizations we all operate in have been created by a certain set of people. So those rules still continue. And so while we're trying to make change, in a set of institutions that were created with inherent bias, because that's just the reality of our our lives. Allies become really important. And what Allyship looks like is you know, Cynthia, as an example, I'm your boss, and so the hypothetical. And so one of the things as an ally I can do for you is you pitch an idea to a leadership team And for whatever reason, it's like, well, you know, there there's there's buys that might be at play and either listening to that pitch or not. And what I can do as an ally is someone who is a part of that team, is a part of the the team of people that makes the rules is I can amplify you. I can say, did you I don't know if you heard what Cynthia actually said, but she was pointing out these three things, which are really important to our strategy. And when I say it as someone who's part of the group that actually helps make the rules or has historically made the rules, it sounds different to the people hearing it very often. And so amplifying you and supporting you as and not let letting you get talked over and not letting you get sort of marginalized literally in a particular situation, I'm being an ally. That's what we want allies to do. We all can be allies. We all can be, you know, as I'm a straight white woman. And so one of the things that I try as much as I possibly can to do, and I get to do it so much in the practice in which I operate, which is amazing is amplifying, you know, a person of color, a woman of color, someone who's part of the LGBTQIA plus community, someone who has different abilities than sort of the, you know, the the norm as we talk about neurodiversity and and ableism and sometimes perceptions that can go along with what someone's abilities are. We all have an opportunity to be an ally. Being an ally is really about utilizing whatever influence you have to amplify someone who might be getting marginalized. It's a huge opportunity. We can all do it. I think this is so great. I, you know, I'm a big fan of women in buying spirits, and I'm a big fan of all allied programs that promote that sort of amplification and and support. And I think just sometimes validation is is hugely important, especially to newer and younger voices, coming from communities that perhaps they didn't have a role model, as they were, you know, coming into their career as a young person. So I I love what you've said about that, and giving, giving a voice to someone using our own power to empower others. I think it's something we forget as especially, I'm the same. I'm, you know, I'm a straight white woman from Ohio. You know, I I live in Europe, and I I forget that I have earned my power, and I have the ability and in fact the responsibility to to use that power to empower others. So I I just can't thank you enough for this whole conversation. It was really great, and I know that our listeners will love it too. I think it's very important in the wine industry. So thank you very, very much for coming on today and talking to us about this. It's been a pleasure. It's great to great to meet you, and I look forward to continuing the conversation in any way that we possibly can because it's so important. We can't. We have to keep this conversation, this whole topic. Front of town. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thank you again. Thank you. Thank you for listening. And remember to tune in next Wednesday when I'll be chatting with another fascinating guest. Italian wine podcast is among the leading wine podcast in the world and the only one with a daily show tune in every day and discover all our different shows. You can find us at Italian wine podcast dot com, SoundCloud, Spotify, Himalaya, or wherever you get your pods.